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* Rick Jelliffe | | * why are scripting languages not in instance notation? & Because they would no longer be scripting languages, but instead unreadable, awkward horrors no one would want to program in. :) | * why are the patterns in XSL not in instance notation? & Probably for the same reason: to avoid excessive verbosity and in the interests of readability. | * why don't people like LISP syntax Probably mainly because they're not exposed to it long enough to discover that it's actually both readable, beautiful and extraordinarily flexible. The macro system in Common Lisp is decades ahead of anything else I've ever seen or heard about. (The same could be said of the object system, although it's possible that Dylan (a CL descendant with different syntax) has the same features.) | (i.e., does the unified syntax actually cause reading panic in | newcomers: With some people, yes. | it has been widely commented that computer languages with different | syntaxes each for assignment, declarations, infix maths, and prefix | functions, such as C and ALGOL family languages have been much more | successful)? There are probably other reasons for that, such as that Unix was written in C, so that all other languages were at a disadvantage. Also, the chaotic jungle of Lisp dialects in the pre-CL (ie: 1985) era probably didn't help either. Nor did the (now long incorrect) rumours of Lisp as a functional, non-OO, untyped, dynamically scoped and slow language. If programming languages were competing on the basis of usability and quality the world would look rather different today. --Lars M. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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